Yesterday I wrote about how 10% of the passengers on two flights from South Africa to The Netherlands could test positive for COVID-19 upon arrival to Amsterdam. Most of the reporting claimed all passengers received pre-departure antigen testing, so I looked at possible places where the system could have broken down.
When researching the post, I found several commenters who said that passengers traveling from South Africa to Amsterdam only needed to show proof of vaccination and not a negative test. I could not find any current information about a negative antigen test requirement, except for a single page on KLM’s South African website. At the time there was no statement from KLM or either government about if the passengers all received testing before boarding the flights.
Aljazeera received a statement from KLM saying that all passengers either tested negative or showed proof of vaccination before boarding planes in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
A spokesperson for KLM, the Dutch arm of Air France, earlier said the passengers on the flight had either tested negative or shown proof of vaccination before getting on planes in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
We don’t know the breakdown of how many positive cases were in vaccinated passengers, but KLM suspects many of the cases were from that group.
The spokesperson said it was possible many of the positive cases were among vaccinated people, or that an unusual number of people developed infections after having tested negative.
In addition, the positive cases have been sequenced and 13 of the 61 positive cases were caused by the new Omicron coronavirus variant.
If there was no variant of concern in South Africa, the passengers would not have been screened upon arrival. Subtracting the Omicron variant, there still would have been 48 positive cases on board the planes and we would have never known.
It’s the shortcoming of depending on vaccinations to control the spread of COVID from country to country. If a passenger has a very mild infection, it may even escape a rapid antigen test and only be discovered by a molecular test.
We’ve already been down the road of requiring all passengers to provide a negative molecular test, usually a PCR, before travel. It’s time-consuming, difficult to coordinate while traveling, and can be costly. Passengers put up with the hassle because it was the only way to travel. Instead, the trend is to show proof of vaccination since it’s more widely available and an easier to administer screen to keep out COVID.
However, the holes in the fully-vaccinated screening system were seen earlier this year when Iceland went from requiring a PCR test upon arrival to not requiring testing for fully-vaccinated visitors. Cases began to rise quickly after that and restrictions were put back into place.
The US requires a negative test for all passengers, age two and up, entering the country by air. Vaccinated passengers can have a result within 3 days while unvaccinated passengers must show a result within 1 day. Entering the country by land only requires proof of vaccination.
For the time being, I’d be ready to get a COVID test before traveling internationally, regardless of your vaccination status. While being fully vaccinated dramatically decreases your chance of becoming severely sick or dying from COVID, breakthrough infections are becoming more common. As long as countries are concerned about the number of cases, testing at the border is here to stay.
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4 comments
What’s your exit ramp to travel without tests if even vaccination isn’t enough for you?
Or are you someone who is willing to submit to a full health panel, blood work and hazmat suits before every flight in 2030 because this has become so normalized by then?
That’s a great question and I don’t have the answer. Vaccination is good for me but it’s not going to eliminate the spread of all cases worldwide, only testing can limit that. Until people are more comfortable with vaccinated people testing positive, the guidelines will be focused on limiting cases instead of looking at the outcomes of those cases (steady cases but less hospital/death.) The majority are not there yet and honestly the number of people getting really sick is still too high to justify this as the status quo. Therapeutics might be the final piece of the puzzle if they can improve outcomes in the remaining cases.
That still seems like an extraordinarily high proportion of positive cases. Something just isn’t right here. I wonder if it’s that the rapid antigen tests were done in a haphazard fashion, the proof of vaccination certificates were faked, or both. If I was investigating this, I’d do some substantial checking into this. My wife and I stayed in the Caribbean last month and our rapid antigen test seemed done in a way that was designed to show negative results. If that’s the norm, no wonder so many cases are being missed.
Some of the flight crew are not vaccinated. I don’t know the situation in this instance. However, I personally know a Delta flight attendant who will not vacinate and this person is flying. I was curious about how they got around all the requirements and found that many locations have a separate set of rules for flight crew. It is very unlikely they are testing before every flight, but maybe do antigen tests. Certainly, they aren’t doing PCR tests in order to fly.